Posting this article as a neutral account of the causes leading up to the March 1971 Liberation War in Bangladesh, a piece by Sydney Schanberg, a Pulitzer prize-winning columnist. Please read carefully and discuss in an un-biased manner, though difficult it might be. We have to understand our historical viewpoints on both sides.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Bengalis and the Punjabis: Nation Split by Geography, Hate
By SYDNEY H. SCHANBERG DEC. 4, 1970
December 4, 1970, Page 10
“The British started the racial domination of Punjabi over Bengali,” a Bengali intellectual said with a sneer the other day. “They liked to talk paternally about the simple, straight forward, martial Punjabis, much better fellows than those nasty, scheming Bengalis.”
It is hard to imagine two races or regions any more different. They speak different languages—Urdu in the West, Bengali in the East—eat different foods—meat and grain in the West, fish and rice in the East— and have almost contradictory cultures, for the Bengalis are volatile and love politics and literature while the Punjabis are more stolid and prefer governing and soldiering.
The only thing the two wings have in common is their religion, Islam. That was the basis for the country's creation when it was decided that Hindus and Moslems could not live peacefully together and the subcontinent was carved into largely Hindu India and the two Moslem segments that make up Pakistan.
Glue May Lose Its Hold
The glue of Islam may finally be losing its hold. Many observers deem it a miracle that the two regions have stuck together so long and believe that their separation into independent nations is only a matter of time.
National elections will be held next Monday—the first full elections under adult franchise in Pakistan's history— and East Pakistan is pushing for a form of regional autonomy that many believe is only a prelude to secession.
There has recently been talk that the Government, under pressure from the Punjabi‐run army, is planning to postpone the elections, but fears of popular uprising in East Pakistan have apparently quashed any such intention.
The Bengalis would have regarded postponement as a flimsy pretext for continuing the martial ‐ law regime proclaimed last year, when Gen Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan became President, and with it the domination of the East by the West.
“If the elections are aborted,” warned Sheik Mujibur Rahman, leader of the Awami League, the East's key political party, “The people will owe it to the million who have died in the cyclone to make the supreme sacrifice of another million lives, if need be, so that we can live as a free people. We will no longer suffer the arbitrary rule of the bureaucrats, the capitalists and the feudal interests of West Pakistan.”
Pakistan is that rare country where the majority region is the backward one. Although the East has 75 million people to the West's 55 million, the West has received the over whelming proportion of the development funds, factories, public‐works projects and defense facilities.
Prices are higher in East Pakistan, with rice and wheat twice as costly, although per capita income is at least 50 per cent lower. Six times as much electricity is produced in the West, four times as much foreign aid is spent there, three times as many imports are consumed there, twice as much development money is allocated there and nine times as much is spent on defense.
The disparity is heightened, grimly, by the population pressure in East Pakistan, with 20 million more people than in the West in an area only a sixth as large. If the United States had the same density, it would have 4.5 billion people. Broken down, it is more than 1,300 per square mile on the average and as high as 2,100 in cultivated areas.
Perpetual Disaster Area
The pressure, matched only in some parts of Japan, Taiwan and Communist China, has forced the division of farms into smaller and less profitable plots and has pushed hundreds of thousands of the poorest peasants down into the fertile but dangerous lowlands and offshore islands of the Ganges Delta.
Eighty per cent of East Pakistan is less than 50 feet above sea level; the delta areas, even lower, are more vulnerable to storms and monsoon flooding.
East Pakistan is a perpetual disaster area, even in “normal” times—ravaged by cholera, typhoid and smallpox, by pests and filth, by raging unemployment and monsoon floods.
West Pakistan, benefiting from the so‐called green revolution in improved agricultural yields, is just about self‐sufficient in food while East Pakistan has an annual deficit of some 2.5 million tons. Experts say it could be five million tons by 1975, which could mean famine.
As if internal problems were not enough, East Pakistan has been far more damaged than was the western sector by the partition, which virtually cut it off from neighboring West Bengal, now a state of India. All trade between them has been forbidden since the brief Indian ‐ Pakistani war over Kashmir in 1965.
The coal that used to come from West Bengal now comes from Communist China at as much as 10 times the cost. The only cement factory in East Pakistan, which used to get its limestone from India, must get it from less economical domestic deposits and pay five times the Indian price.
If the East Pakistanis win a measure of regional autonomy, they will immediately press to improve trade with India, one of the moves feared by the army and the hierarchy of the central Government in West Pakistan.
Generals Are Fearful
The Generals know that with greater provincial autonomy, the central Government's powers would be reduced and the vast military spending, some times as much as half of the budget, would be sharply cut. The army also knows that better relations with India would weaken the arguments for perpetuating the Kashmir dispute, which is one of the main reasons for the army's existence and has never aroused the Bengalis as it has the Punjabis, who live next to the disputed territory.
Does the answer to all this woe lie in breaking Pakistan into two nations, as many militant Bengalis and even some Punjabis tired of the crisis now believe? But could East Pakistan, with its overwhelming problems, survive as a separate entity?
The fear of not surviving is what is keeping the dominant Bengali political forces from demanding secession right now.
“If we are the majority, we are Pakistan!” Sheik Mujibur thundered at a meeting with the foreign press last week.
Unfortunately for the Bengalis, the army and its powerful friends in West Pakistan do not quite see it that way.
__________________________________________________________________________
I will be posting more insightful articles soon from that era by Mr. Schanberg.
East Pakistan Leader Voices a Secession Threat
By SYDNEY SCHANBERG NOV. 27, 1970
DACCA, Pakistan, Nov. 26— Sheik Mujibur Rahman, East Pakistan's dominant political leader, warned the central government today that if the national elections were postponed, “I go for a total struggle” for secession of East Pakistan.
There have been reports that President Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan might once again postpone the elections for a National Assembly, which are scheduled for Dec. 7 and which would be the first full and free election based on adult franchise in Pakistan's 23‐year history.
The elections were originally scheduled for Oct. 5, but when monsoon floods disrupted much of East Pakistan, the President put them off, President Yahya, who returned this afternoon from a two‐day tour of the coastal area devastated by the cyclone and tidal wave of Nov. 13, would presumably declare a postponement this time on the ground that the damage, caused by the cyclone and tidal wave, in which the official death toll is over 175,000, had produced a national emergency.
This, however, probably would be regarded in East Pakistan as merely an excuse for continuing the present martial law regime, and, with it, West Pakistan domination over East Pakistan. The eastern and western sections of the country are separated by over a thousand miles of Indian territory.
The Bengalis of East Pakistan feel that the central Government, which is run from West Pakistan and is controlled by the Punjabis, did not press relief efforts after the cyclone and therefore proved its callousness and indifference to the plight of the poorer and more populous East.
Sheik Mujibur, charging “our own rulers” with “criminal negligence”, said, “A massive rescue and relief operation, if launched within 24 hours of the disaster, could have saved thousands of lives.”
Speaking at a chaotic news conference attended by many foreign correspondents, the 50 year‐old leader of the Awami league, who had just returned from a tour of the disaster area, said, “Only present experience has brought into sharp focus the basic truth that every Bengali has felt in his bones, that we have been treated so long as a colony and a market that we have been denied our birthrights as the free citizens of an independent state.”
